Today non-Africans have an unparalleled
opportunity to see Africa through African eyes. Fifteen years
ago [1956] there were few writings by Africans in Western
languages. Since then we have had placed before us hundreds of
literary expressions by black Africans.

This literature fills a yawning void for
African also—helping them construct new self-images, positions
in society and meanings of life.

Great artists convey the universal
condition of man in particular situations. The universal element
is readily apparent: whether it is a ten-year-old boy
discovering that books hold stories, a teenager being chased by
the police, a woman finding out her husband wants another wife
or an aged pastor trying to talk theology with a young man.

All these human predicaments are
complicated by what the white world has done to the black world,
by what the rich nations have done to the poor nations, by what
the Christian societies have done to societies with other
religious beliefs.

In James Ngugi’s novel, A Grain of
Wheat, during the war that white settlers in Kenya called
“Mau Mau,” a Kikuyu husband was “detained” without trial
by whites in a concentration camp for seven years and forbidden
any communication with his wife. When they finally have the
opportunity to speak to each other, the wife says, “Too much
has happened to be passed over in a sentence.” Immediate
reunion is not possible yet. Reconciliation can take place only
when a shared understanding of what has passed is accepted; when
there is the will to forge a new, equal relationship, when a
plan for the future is in sight.

This impasse between husband and wife is
symbolic of the relationship between Africa and the West. There
is increasing separation black and white. Immediate
reconciliation is not possible. One has injured the other. One
has misruled the other. One has libeled the other. Now is the
time to share in the cry of what has happened to Africa.

These stories contain many kinds of cries.
The Dutch philosopher, William Zuurdeeg urges us to pay special
attention to a cry. “A man may become genuinely human when he
cries out in anguish, triumph, in furious rebellion and in
joyful reverence.” Such crying, he says, is an act almost
unavailable to Western man because, for us, a cry is not a
respectable mode of behavior. He asks “Who can live by a
cry?” Who can stand it to hear such disturbing noise?” The
creative artist can live by crying out in his writing. The
creative reader can stand it to listen. As Africans cry aloud in
their literature, one can hear them give new personal, social
and cultural definition to themselves and to those with ears to
listen.

Personal Definition

In a racist society the black child sees
others looking at him; he sees them making judgments: he
believes them. The short story by James Matthews, “The
Park,” tells how a little African boy’s looking-glass image
of himself is formed. In the eyes of those who count, he is
worthless. Colonialism, discrimination, apartheid—all these
forces in African have inflicted grave wounds upon the black
self. Can literature undo in any these detrimental images of the
self?

Lewis Nkosi, a South African writer who
grew up in that little boy’s world, believes that literature
does have the power to mold life. But until the last dozen years
there were no literary heroes with whom young African could
identify. Novels by white men, by Graham Greene and Joyce Cary,
skilled though they were in portraying white colonial society,
used Africa only as an exotic backdrop and stuck in a few
caricatures of black Africans. These novels provided only
negative stereotypes for black Africans—but no sense of
identity.

For decades our African heroes have been
white, one, Albert Schweitzer, seems to have been more concerned
about the universal human struggle of the soul than about the
particularity of the African soul. Another, Alan Paton, seems in
his first novel,
Cry the Beloved Country, to be more
concerned to reach the conscience of “white liberals” with
the injustice of South Africa than to reach the psyche of
African youths. Useful as their contributions to Africans have,
these white heroes did not provide the new generation of
Africans with positive models of identity. They did bring the
continent to our attention; but today there are black writers
who can take us into its heartland!

Recalling his own youth, Lewis Nkosi says
that

. . . when we entered the decade of the
fifties we had no literary heroes, like generations in
other parts of the world. We had to improvise because
there were no models who could serve as moral examples
for us. . . . [as] a generation we longed desperately
for literary heroes we could respect and with whom we
could identify. In the moral chaos through which we were
living we longed to find a work of literature, a drama
or film, homegrown and about us, which would contain a
significant amount of our experience and in which we
could find our own attitudes and feelings.

The stories herein contain many models for
youth. . . .

Cultural Definition

“Africa has suffered more than any other
continent,” states novelist Ayi Kwei Armah. From 1442 to 1880,
69,000,000 Africans were captured by European slavers, put on
ships, chained, closed in under the deck, sporadically fed and
left to defecate and urinate on themselves. One-third of them
survived the trip. The Western world knows very little about
African suffering. Jews past and present have suffered greatly
too; but in contrast their suffering is well-known through
Europe and North America. Why do we know the suffering of the
Jewish people, but not the suffering of Africa?"

One reason is that the Jews wrote down
their own history, a history that stressed political defeat and
dispersion as much as it stressed victory and empire, in the Old
Testament where it was available to everyone in the West to
read. Today Africans are writing down their history, containing
such epics as the building of Mali, Ghana, and Songhay empires.
Information comes from oral tradition, archaeology and archives
of Islamic and other scholars.

African historians are retelling their war
stories, such as the placing in battle of 200,000 warriors of
Ghana in 1066 A.D., the same year in which the Normans could
muster only 15,000 soldiers to invade England. And also they are
chronicling their defeats at the hands of all the colonial
powers. It was the genius of the Jewish people that they took
their experiences of suffering and made them the cohesive core
that strengthened their common bonds for centuries.

In this collection of African stories,
there are many interpretations of African suffering: knowledge
of evil, reality of injustice, loneliness away from parents,
destroyed love, self-awareness, bitterness, ethnocentrism,
tyranny, corruption, brokenness. In Soyinka’s
The
Interpretersthe response of college friends to the suicide
of a brilliant colleague is one of despair: “Sekoni’s death
had left them all wet, bedraggled, the paint running down their
acceptance of life where they thought the image was set. . .
.” But there is
also hop. The extent of Africans’ suffering and the uniqueness
of their situation gives a unique shape to their hopes.

In Africa many religious, intellectual and
political movements have attracted followers with the promise of
hope. Spiritualist groups have promised release from suffering.
Renascent indigenous religions have purified themselves of what
they consider Western taint. Islam has promised acceptance of
the black race as equal. Secularism has rejected the white
man’s Trinity. Independent Christian churches have sought
release from a white hierarchy.

“Negritude” has asserted that black is
most beautiful and Africa the source of goodness. “African
personality” has claimed that the whole man is superior to the
overly intellectualized people of the West. Right now the word
on many lips is Pan-Africanism. Once, this term referred to the
political unification of the dozens of African states. Today it
incorporates a creed including concern for deprived African
everywhere, unity of all black peoples, responsibility of one
African for another and the need to organize black people beyond
the limitations of tribalism.

Out of this suffering and in this hope, Africans are
redefining the meaning of their continent. . . .

Lewis Nkosi (5 December 1936 – 5 September 2010) was a South
African writer and essayist. He was a multifaceted personality, and
attempted every literary genre, literary criticism, poetry, drama, and
novels. Nkosi worked for many years in
Durban for the magazine Ilanga lase Natal and in
Johannesburg for
Drum.

Nkosi faced severe restrictions on
his writing due to the publishing regulations found in the
Suppression of Communism Act and the Publications and Entertainment
Act passed in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1961, he received a scholarship to
study at Harvard, and he began his life in exile. He was an editor for
The New African in London, and the NET in the United
States. He became a Professor of Literature and held positions at the
University of Wyoming and the
University of California-Irvine, as well as at universities in
Zambia and
Warsaw,
Poland.

As opposed to apartheid, Nkosi's
work explores themes of politics, relationships, and sexuality. His
essays and other works were published over four decades in America,
England and Africa. His works, possessing great depth, received less
recognition than they had actually deserved. In the post-apartheid era,
his works are gaining critical attention across the third world.
Interestingly, Nkosi joined forces with African powerhouse authors
Chinua Achebe and
Wole Soyinka in an interview in the third chapter of Bernth Lindfors'
Conversations With Chinua Achebe. In 1978, Nkosi and composer
Stanley Glasser wrote a collection of six
Zulu-style songs called "Lalela Zulu" for
The King's Singers, a group of six white British, male
a cappella singers.—Wikipedia

From his cell in Durban, South Africa,
the black narrator of this short, powerful novel can see
mating birds "clinging to each other joyfully in the bright
air as though for dear life." But he is condemned to die:
condemned for mating with a white woman. On her accusation,
he has been found guilty of rape; by his account they were
"mating birds," drawn together across racial barriers by
irrepressible sexual desire. While the nature of their
encounter remains ambiguous, the squalid evils of apartheid
are rendered with the utmost clarity. Nkosi, an exiled South
African, has a fine ear for dialogue and an unusual economy
of expression. Recommended for black studies and fiction
collections.—Peter Sabor,
Library Journal

Lewis Nkosi is one of
South Africa’s foremost writers and critics, and one of the
few survivors of the exile generation dating from the Drum
era. Up until now, however, no full length study has been
done on his work. This is a gap in South African literary
history and criticism that this book is intended to fill.
Besides his well known earlier works, Nkosi is still very
much an active writer as the publication in 2002 of his
novel, Underground People, shows, with his latest novel due
out in 2005. The timing of
Still Beating the Drum, a book which intends to
highlight and evaluate his extensive and varied oeuvre, is
thus appropriate. Given Lewis Nkosi’s life trajectory, this
volume will appeal to readers interested in South African
and African literature, both in South Africa and abroad.

Intended as a important critical
resource on Lewis Nkosi, the book is divided into three
parts:

Part One collects papers from scholars around the
world currently working on Nkosi’s work in various genres; Part Two
reprints key articles from different moments in Nkosi’s critical
writing, together with hitherto unpublished recent interviews with Nkosi;
and Part Three provides the reader with a timeline and extensive
bibliography for Lewis Nkosi, both invaluable resources for scholars
working on Nkosi given the scattered nature of much of his more
ephemeral writings in the past. Lewis Nkosi is an important figure in
South African literature whose voice has been heard far and wide—this
book aims to collect for critical consideration some of the echoes and
reverberations his voice has generated.